The Design Community’s Power to Elevate the Human Condition Above all else, we must never forget that designing places is about understanding people. While we can appreciate the beauty of the buildings we create and the intelligence of the systems we define, ultimately these things are only successful if they help the people who will use them. Creating successful schools and hospitals is not simply about designing modern facilities with cutting-edge technology. It’s about listening to the pulse of the community that needs these spaces. Understanding its challenges, its economy, its health outcomes, its fundamental needs – and delivering the right solution for that specific community. When the design community…

Our Open Hand Studio hosted their fifth annual Meet & Match event in our brand new Boston office last week. With the Boston Society of Architects Foundation as our partners, we opened our doors to our new neighborhood and hosted a night of celebrating community-based design in Boston. The event was a wonderful success, bringing over 70 designers and community group leaders together for a one-of-a-kind opportunity: to share public interest design project ideas and meet with potential new partners in order to realize those concepts. I feel very thankful we were able to connect with and contribute to our Boston community in this way! Attendees heard from two kickoff speakers:…

Increasing Impact Chicago’s Building Energy Use Benchmarking ordinance now calls on existing municipal, commercial, and residential buildings larger than 50,000 square feet to track whole-building energy use, report to the City annually, and verify data accuracy every three years. Under the leadership of current Mayor Rahm Emanuel, this new ordinance includes a much larger population of buildings and accounts for ~20% of total energy used by all buildings. Read more at the Chicago Energy Benchmarking website. CannonDesign is proud to support the Mayor in these continued efforts. Former mayor, Richard M. Daley (1989-2011), set a goal for Chicago to become the greenest big city in the world. Individual projects can…

Express traditional cathedral motifs with exposed structural steel Ave Maria University’s 1,100-seat Oratory resembles a traditional cathedral, rendered in classic motifs but expressed in a modern palette of glass, steel and stone. The non-orthogonal connections, many with multiple curved members joined at widely varying and acute angles, required a highly integrated engineering and architectural process to facilitate resolution of aesthetic and construction concerns. Steel buttresses are expressed from the interior to the exterior as free-standing exposed steel frames penetrate the outer skin, hinting at the lattice steel bents which form the basis of the overall structure. In this building, the structure is the architecture and is the most prominent foreground…

6th Consecutive Doors Open Toronto Event This past weekend, the Toronto office participated in the annual Doors Open event for the sixth consecutive year. Amongst an array of historically and culturally significant buildings, we were one of only 9 participating design studios to open our doors to the public, and indeed, to our profession. In honour of this summer’s Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Games, this year’s theme – Sports, Recreation and Leisure – also featured private and public recreational sites ranging from aquatic centres to athletics stadiums. Fittingly, CannonDesign proudly showcased three venues that have recently completed construction – the Mattamy Velodrome in Milton, the TiCats Stadium in Hamilton, and…